It used to be a real challenge to talk to someone across Alaska, or across the country. Many Alaskans remember waiting in line to use the only telephone in a village. For me, it was the phone at the winter watchman's house in Ekuk. We each got a few minutes because everyone was waiting. Long-distance calls were expensive, and simply talking to family or conducting business required patience and persistence. Even after the internet arrived, connectivity remained limited in many parts of Alaska. Just a handful of years ago, I visited Unalaska, where businesses routinely copied payroll records onto DVDs and shipped them overnight because their internet connections couldn't support cloud-based applications. Those experiences were separated by decades, but they reflected the same challenge: in Alaska, the need for connectivity often arrived long before the infrastructure did. Today, those stories are history.  Students attend online classes. Patients meet with specialists hundreds of miles away through telehealth. Small businesses manage payroll and accounting in the cloud. Families share video calls. Commercial fishermen check weather forecasts and fishery announcements from their boats. Connectivity has become part of everyday life.

[Christine O'Connor is executive director of the Alaska Telecom Association]

In the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable. The companies and public services our communities depend on—from hospitals to water treatment plants to the infrastructure that powers the internet—are at risk. Today’s AI advances are already giving defenders new ways to fix weaknesses that have accumulated for years. If we act decisively, we can use the defenders’ window to make our digital world much more secure. We propose the following principles for a collective response:

• Recognize that status quo security won’t be enough. Longstanding bugs, excessive permissions, misconfigurations, insecure and unpatched software, weak authentication, and technical debt in legacy systems have left systems exposed. Security teams, particularly for critical infrastructure, have been historically under-resourced and need a surge in tools and resources.
• Empower more defenders with cyber-capable AI. AI brings specialist skills to more defenders and makes core security tasks faster, cheaper and better. Sharing tools, practical knowledge, and verified fixes lets one organization’s work help protect many others.
• Mobilize a collective response. Cyber capabilities are advancing worldwide, and that can be a net positive: no single company should control the future. It also means a global response is necessary, requiring new partnerships to raise security standards and find new solutions to emerging cyber threats.

On August 27, 2026, the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education filed an amicus brief in the case of Patterson v. Meta. CDT filed this brief to bring to the court’s attention the broader impacts on free expression that weakening Section 230 will have on speech that is constitutionally protected but controversial. The brief explains that Section 230’s liability protections are essential to enable free expression online, and they extend to the use of automated systems to engage to rank and order content as part of traditional publishing activities. It further argues that product liability claims do not fall outside of Section 230’s ambit, requiring courts to consider whether a particular product liability claim seeks to hold a service provider liable as a publisher of third party content. This appeal follows a significant victory in the lower court, which favorably cited CDT’s earlier amicus brief in holding that content-ranking algorithms are protected editorial activity under Section 230.